PrOdiGy1

cheers pichi. i will give it a try and let you know what happens but i am almost resigned to it being lost forever now

yes that is the one i used eventually, along with the other you mentioned earlier in this thread

simply because the firmware update on cd did not work and i am just trying other things out. either way when i shut down and powercycle the computer, i am still told in the POST screen i am running SD15 and i have no idea why

right scratch all that. just tried the official sd1a update again via a flash drive and the flasher told me everything went fine and to power cycle the drive. did so and yet it still shows SD15 upon the next boot :/ it should be noted that the flashing did seem too quick. only took about 5 seconds which does not seem right to me

yep i managed to get that far, was just wondering what flasher you were referring to earlier in this thread though as the one in the zip for me is FDL462a and you didn't mention it. where could i find the stable ones? the one in the official seagate firmware pack is FDL462b, but the official sd1a did not work on my drive at all. i have no idea why. any recommendations on how i should proceed?

.exe is inside .ZIP file from .img ! there is no .zip inside my .img file :/ or do i have to open the .img file in poweriso as well as extracting it and creating the [boot] folder? yeah that is what i had to do. can see the zip folder now in poweriso. the flasher is actually FDL462a, is that not a stable release? i know you did not mention it in your post, just seems a lot of versions away! also i did try flashing with the one from the seagate KB site but it couldn't seem to get my drive details for the bootable pen drive. i found a pretty good guide (considering it is pretty hard to format them if you don't have a floppy drive and are on vista!): How to format a usb pen drive

all you will get from seagate support via email is a blanket email (if any response at all). i thought this was old news. the only way to get any sort of interactive feedback is via the telephone support (and from my experience they usually will not be much use either until you ask to talk to a supervisor)

thanks for that mini guide! unfortunately i have got a little bit confused. i managed to extract the .iso fine using 7-zip and also the Bootable_1.44M.img. i cannot see any flasher .exes in the newly extracted files though. any thoughts? These are the only files i see: Clicky (ignore the mac theme ) also sorry i just noticed you edited your post after i made this reply. you mention the link you posted is for the moose family? is there any way of finding out which one i need or do i have to try different ones?

You'll need to check the flasher (.exe) program. Stable release is FDL456b.exe, bad one is FDL456.exe. Used FDL457.exe to force a downgrade. sorry, but i have no idea how to do that. if i extract the .iso all i get is a drivedetect exe and a readme file. which flasher was the one in your link above? the firmware update i used is the one you linked to above. was that the wrong one?

just tried updating the firmware on my ST3500320AS drive and i get these: Attempting to read binary file: SD1AMOOS.LOD Timed out Resetting device... and then it just hangs there. any ideas why?

yes that should be free. it is the one i called for hours and didnt get charged. in skype just call "+18007324283" actually i just noticed the numbers are slightly different. are you sure the one you gave in your post is correct? because it is not recognised. looks like there is an extra 4 in there

in terms of the phone number, if it is a 1.800 number you can ring it via skype for no charge. if not then you will probably end up with quite a big phone bill....

excellent work gradius! looking forward to seeing the pictures!

i do not know for sure but i doubt it? if the drive cannot be detected then it is pretty hard to apply firmware.... It detected fine on BIOS, but at the end of POST, it returned "drive not ready", and I couldn't access my datas anymore. yep that was my point - the drive you applied the new firmware to was not in the BSY state, like others have been

i do not know for sure but i doubt it? if the drive cannot be detected then it is pretty hard to apply firmware....

this person is right! mine was affected when i entered my number in so i was wondering why so many others were having problems. i just put it in again in lower case and it tells me my drive is not affected. make sure you enter the letters in caps on the seagate checker! See this post if your serial number is coming up as not affected. also make sure there are no spaces when you enter into the field (this can happen if you are copying and pasting the number from somewhere) as that also messes up the search. pretty pants coding i have to admit!

this person is right! mine was affected when i entered my number in so i was wondering why so many others were having problems. i just put it in again in lower case and it tells me my drive is not affected. make sure you enter the letters in caps on the seagate checker!

that is exactly what i said in my previous post!

great, have to ring them again! stupid thing is i spent 3 hours on the phone to them about this issue already and they would not acknowledge it!!! i do not want to be going through that again in terms of the number, it is a freephone number so you should be able to ring it from new zealand if you get the right extension. personally, i am in the UK and i rang it through skype no problems and didnt get charged

interesting about the data recovery rumours. i wonder if they will offer this worldwide though? would surprise me! but it wouldn't surprise me if they blacklisted the folks that posted their drive details in here (people like me )!

snipbut good companies does mass recalls, and I do find that a good thing. Gradius exactly. good companies would sort this out. if seagate turned around and offered to fix all these drives for us, so rare is decent customer service these days that i would probably only ever buy seagate hard drives from that point forward. however, they wont.

i think it is more likely he is trying to get this thread removed than him posting anything here! in terms of this rumoured new firmware, it is likely that it will not "fix" the people whose drives have already locked up, but is intended for people who have not yet experienced any failure to prevent it from happening. seems to me like this is probably the cheapest option for them to deal with this crisis they are facing. this caters for the folks who do not want to RMA the drive because we will just get another back that is going to do the exact same thing. but they really need to come up with a proper solution for us customers that have locked up drives other than RMAing it, because the cost of data recovery for an obvious fault on the part of seagate is the cause of the problem. they say in their warranty they do not cover data recovery costs, well that is fine, but come up with a PROPER solution for everybody then! if data recovery companies have found a way around this, surely seagate know how to fix it?!

in short, no. the failure being talked about in this thread has absolutely no symptoms.

Keep in mind that Seagate has a team of lawyers, and this thread is one threatening fax away from being deleted. This problem is going to be too big to hide in a few months, but you know they'll do everything they can to keep the public oblivious. would not surprise me at all. might be worth someone keeping a backup cache of the thread somewhere also i just did a search for seagate barracuda 7200.11 and this thread came up top of my results! ah no nevermind. just noticed its only done that because i added it as a result to the search term

think you might have the dates mixed up there!